Outdoor Photography How To

We often hear people complain that there’s nothing interesting to photograph where they live. Well, one of our writers lives in the most densely populated state in America (New Jersey). Here are some of the images he captured during a two-hour period one Friday morning without traveling more than 15 miles from home. And to prove that good photos exist everywhere—if we just look—he used only one camera and one lens.

There are a multitude of reasons why what you observe in the field may appear vastly different than the image you capture unless you make adjustments while shooting or do so later during the editing process. The quick video below from the Hoffman Photography YouTube channel explores an "enlightening" oft-ignored fact.

If you’re going to be a serious landscape photographer, you need a serious tripod but what’s mystifying is how little thought people put into picking one out. That’s exactly why professional photographer Tom Mackie of Landscape Photography iQ made the below video gear guide.

Upscaling photos is a common task, and there are a variety of ways to get the job done. Discussions about which method to use, however, typically revolve around how images look on the computer screen at 100% or more.

It’s not uncommon for photographers to adopt a “set-it-and-forget it” mentality when configuring their cameras, thereby ending up with photographs that aren’t as good as possible. Whether you call this habit lazy or uninformed, there are times when the choice of a custom setting results in more creative images.

Photographers revere the Golden Hour, but when does it actually get dark? You have a rough idea of when night falls where you live, but what if you’re traveling to a distant location in another time zone? Here’s a link to a US Navy website that will fetch all pertinent sunrise and sunset information that you need.

Before I answer the question above, a few words about the kinds of pictures I like to take. Simply, they are pictures that are different—different from what others might be shooting at a particular location, even different from what I might have shot at that location the last time I visited.